I love weird phones. This isn’t really a secret. I’ve had a parade of weird phones march across my desk for the past eight months. Now, the Galaxy S6 Edge is official. Another weird phone has come to the masses! The phones themselves were shaped weird, worked in a weird way, or were just weird to use (by societal standards). I’ve become something of a weird aficionado. I love weird phones. But here’s the thing. The very fact that they’re weird begs the question – why make weird phones? From a strictly bottom line standpoint, weird phones are money suckers. They take a ton of ...

Barcelona is a tad colder this time around than last year. Maybe it's the weather, or the fact that we can't wait to see all the goodies the companies have in store for us. This year's MWC 2015 team has set a solid foot on the ground, with Michael Fisher, Jaime Rivera, and myself getting ready to bring you our usual coverage from the show floor. That, as always consists of hands-on, comparison, and feature videos, podcasts, bloopers, all the juicy stuff you've grown to love, helped by our news team back at home keeping you up to date with everything that's going on. Alcatel OneTouch, ASUS, ...

A couple of weeks ago, I used a BlackBerry phone for the first time as a daily driver. I carried it for a couple of weeks a learned a lot about what it means to be a quintessential BlackBerry user. Today, I have dashed completely to the other side of the market share spectrum and I have entered another culture, which is in some ways more interesting and in other ways a bit scarier. Today, I am an iPhone user. For the first few years of my career in mobile technology, I had in irrational hatred for all things Apple. They were too expensive, too limited, too…Starbucks…for me to take ...

Back in my early days of "smartphonery", I went with Android and my brother went with BlackBerry - the one with the rollerball. You know which one I'm talking about. Today, the rollerball is gone and the latest and greatest is the BlackBerry Passport. "Hey Joe, you haven't used a BlackBerry in a long time, let's see how you like this new BlackBerry Passport!" That's how the conversation began. I didn't like BlackBerry very much back then, so I came into this "adventure" more than a little biased. (You've been warned.) Days later a packaged arrived in the Pocketnow Utah office. I opened the ...

Funny thing about startups. Sometimes they strike gold, and sometimes they strike fool’s gold. Pebble seems to be the former as it announced its new Time smartwatch that will be available in May. The Time smartwatch will have a color screen, maintain its week-long battery life, and include voice input. Pebble has also recreated its interface on more of a time-based model, rather than app based. Then I saw the money. The moo-lah. The dinero. Pebble asked for $500,000 on Kickstarter and as of this writing, they’ve raised ten million dollars. So, one might say, that Pebble’s got game. ...

After over two years on AT&T, Michael Fisher recently made the switch to T-Mobile US for his personal smartphone account. This is the second in a series of posts about the experience. (For those who prefer to start at the beginning, part 1 is here) • It's not T-Mobile's fault that its network failed at precisely the moment the Pocketnow Weekly podcast needed it the most, but it sure didn't help ease my transition to the "Uncarrier" lifestyle. Regular Weekly listeners know what I'm talking about: during the recording of episode 135, a score of technical issues struck our weekly ...

MWC is the largest mobile electronics show of the season. From around the globe vendors, OEMs, and carriers unite in Barcelona for a week filled with toys and gadgets that make sites like these downright giddy with excitement. It’s like Christmas and Opening Day rolled into one. There’s hope and anticipation hanging in the air. And right in the middle of it, two Android powerhouses square off and deliver an epic one-two punch to the mobile industry. Samsung stands unrivaled in market share around the world, but has found that stranglehold slipping of late. HTC is the plucky upstart – ...

One of the benefits of driving a rental car is you get to taste a little bit of how others live. Unlike smartphones, cars don’t generally get rotate on a two-year cycle. If you buy a car, chances are you have it for at least five years, if not ten or fifteen. So it’s easy to get out of touch with what’s going on in the world of automobiles. But sometimes life affords you the opportunity to explore just a bit, and that’s how I found myself behind the wheel of a Ford Edge recently. Microsoft has partnered with Ford for some time now, powering Ford’s entertainment/environmental ...

Do you remember the last time you looked at a phone display and picked up what turned out to be a display unit? Rather than the actual device, merchants often put out fake phones which - from a distance - look real. These often use the same chassis, but contain no components on the inside, so they're super light, and their screens are a glossy picture rather than an actual display. That was our first impression of the BLU Vivo Air, luckily that impression was quickly replaced with respect. The Vivo Air is thin, it's light, and it looks a lot like an iPhone 6. Beyond first impressions, ...

Have you ever wondered which is the more "stable" mobile OS, Android or iOS? This sort of question usually starts flame wars, brings out fanboys on both sides of the isle, and ultimately comes down to a matter of perception and opinion. What if there were some hard data to "prove", once and for all, which was more stable? Thanks to a report from Crittercism, we've got just that - but what the data shows isn't what the headlines make it out to be. Let's dig into the claim and see if Android is more stable than iOS. The Report First and foremost, the headlines are absolutely correct - and ...

Yes, Windows 10 for phones is a big mess so far, but we were kind of expecting that. The public preview released on February 12, 2015 is the earliest Microsoft has ever released a testing version of their mobile phone operating system. I've been privately & publicly beta testing software products since the mid 90's, and in using this, it really seems a long way from an official release. Naturally this means there will be plenty of bugs, but what worries us the most is that so much of the new operating system is going in such an odd direction. Our fears were correct, as many Windows ...

Samsung is leading the pack of smartphones powered by Android. Arguably the primary competition for Apple, Samsung has made some great hardware over the years. This time around we've been teased with “great vision” and “a unique view” coming in "The Next Galaxy". What does that mean, and what can we expect from the Samsung Galaxy S6? Let’s gather all our intel and see what we can come up with! Construction Not long ago we saw what was reported to be a fairly detailed schematic of the Galaxy S6's dimensions. If that document holds true we could see a phone that's 7.19mm thick, ...

I've said it before and I'll say it again, HTC makes some dang good hardware - going back all the way to when the company manufactured PDAs running Windows Mobile. These days, HTC is going it on its own, responsible for the design, construction, marketing, deployment, and support of a wide and varied allotment of handsets powered by both Android and Windows Phone. The flagship leading the charge is the HTC One - currently the One (M8). HTC generally announces its next-generation flagship at MWC. With MWC 2015 just around the corner, we all suspect that the One M9 will be announced at the ...

Smartwatches are the next big thing, or so they been saying for a while now. I'm still a little skeptical because they also said that about TVs/smartphones with 3D screens which seem all but extinct these days. Everyone is expecting Apple to hit it big with their Apple Watch if and when it is released, but in the meantime there are many other manufacturers making smartwatches and other wrist-mounted wearable gadgets. I've been using the Microsoft Band since last October, and while I mainly like to use it as a fitness tracker, I've also been using it as a smartwatch since it has plenty of ...

Microsoft introduced its brand new developer preview of Windows 10 to the eager masses last week. Well, it delivered it to some of the eager masses last week. To the rest of the eager masses, there was a giant shoulder shrug emanating out of Redmond. So it made us wonder – what is with Microsoft and its failure to smoothly launch Windows software? Some have argued that Microsoft’s Windows 10 Preview launch is not going all that well, so far. Stephen Schenck wondered this aloud on his latest “Dial ‘F’ for Fail” segment of the latest Pocketnow Weekly. He laid out some excellent ...

By now it should be pretty clear that we're all carrying around full-featured computers in our pockets. Just like the desktop and laptop computers that we've used for years, our mobile devices have the same features and functionality as their full-sized counterparts - sometimes even more: microphones, cameras, broadband Internet connections, and more. One of the main areas of concern is that our smartphones and tablets are "always on" and "always connected" to the Internet. Combined, these present many threats that most users may not even realize. Not to worry! Here are a few android ...

Do you remember the last time you looked at the cell phone display in your local electronics store? How you wandered over and picked up what turned out to be a display unit? Rather than showing the actual device, merchants often put out fake phones which - from a distance - look real. These display models often use the same chassis as their "legitimate" counterparts, but contain no components on the inside, so they're super light, and their screens are nothing but a glossy picture instead of an actual display. That was our first impression of the BLU Vivo Air. Vivo Air Pros The iPhone 6 ...

I’ve been experiencing a lot of firsts of the past few months. I’ve had my first smartwatch review, first time carrying a BlackBerry, and first time testing a device from overseas. It’s the latter I want to discuss today. The fine folks over at Efox-shop hooked us up with a recently released Xiaomi Mi Note and are allowing us to play with it. I’ve had the device in hand for a few days, and been using it as a daily driver for just a couple of days, since saying goodbye to the Galaxy Note Edge. So I wanted to share with you a few first impressions of this device. First of all, the ...

(Updated to correct a typo and clarify speculation regarding a 720p model.) You might say we've got a bit of a thing for the ASUS ZenFone 2 here at Pocketnow. It's only been a month since we first laid hands on the phone at CES 2015, and yet we've already had two full-length editorials from our resident Android guy about how the ASUS ZenFone 2 is at once the best bang for your buck and proof that other OEMs are overcharging for their flagship smartphones. Since its announcement, the device has also made a (virtual) appearance on nearly every episode of the Pocketnow Weekly podcast, it's ...

It's been a few weeks since Microsoft unveiled its newest operating system, including the fork Lumia-lovers have been waiting for: the mobile platform we're calling "Windows 10 phone edition." Since then, we've seen lots of news concerning the company's new smartphone software, from leaks documenting some of the features we saw on stage to statements regarding which devices will actually get Windows 10 phone edition, to user concerns about its move from a revolutionary to a derivative UX. And we've talked all of these issues to death on the last few episodes of our Weekly podcast. Amid ...

It’s hard to get a handle on tablet sales. Numbers say they are declining, or at least plateauing. Apple sells tablets by the truckload, but it's less truckloads these days. Microsoft’s earnings had a big happy face labeled “Surface”. Android tablet sales are pretty much Kindle, Samsung, and everyone else in that order. But what is clear is that tablets as consumption devices are starting to lose their allure, just a little bit. Enough to start to make OEMs just what they are going to do about this. Apple has come up with a great solution that should help tablet sales, at least in ...

Google's Nexus program is an interesting beast. Some of us originally felt that it was about providing a reference platform against which other OEMs could aspire. Others felt it was a way for Google to provide a reasonably spec'd smartphone or tablet at a reasonable price - in an effort to drive the price of Android-powered devices down. Still more felt it was a way for Google to show off "pure Android" in an ever growing sea of "skins". Alas, the Nexus 6 seems to discount most of those theories. Google's Nexus 6 is the company's first phablet - and it's price is right in line with what ...

After over two years on AT&T, Michael Fisher recently made the switch to T-Mobile US on his personal smartphone account. This is the first in a series of posts about the experience. (For those interested in jumping ahead, part 2 can be found here.) • My divorce from AT&T began with a realization familiar to anyone who's ever been in a doomed relationship (personal or otherwise): the cost/benefit ratio was no longer working out. I loved being an AT&T customer, but the charges were bleeding me dry. Some of those charges only affected me thanks to my newfound jet-setting ...

In war there are a few proven strategies, one of the more famous is "divide and conquer". The theory goes that by separating the forces of your foes you can more efficiently deal with each group on its own, slowly whittling away at your opposition. Though not nearly as tragic as war in the traditional sense, when it comes to smartphones, tablets, and mobile technology, there is most certainly a war being waged. Instead of fighting for Rights, Liberty, or to acquire land, this spoils of this war are you and I... our personal information, our pocketbooks, and ultimately, our Allegiance. The ...

I have a confession to make. I’m a technology writer, and I’ve never carried a BlackBerry. Ever. There are a lot of reasons for this. By the time I got heavily into the mobile tech scene, BlackBerry had its bags packed and was waiting for a cab. That’s the prime reason. When I started with Pocketnow, The Z10 and Q10 were launched within a few weeks. I wanted to get my hands on one, but it wasn’t in the cards. That is no longer the case. So these days, I’m toting the BlackBerry Classic, courtesy of GSM Nation and US Mobile, which is appropriate in many ways. And I wanted to give ...